Mother Jones Continues to Make the Case...That Guns Save Lives?

(UPDATE BELOW)

Josh Harkinson at MoJo has a series of charts debunking the "gun lobby" claim that "millions of people" stop crime with their guns. Honestly, that number is probably quite exaggerated and is worthy of debunking. However, what he does after establishing this is conflate a whole bunch of numbers for comparisons that obscure a very simple truth: guns save lives. A lot of them.

For example, his first chart [click through] compares gun related homicides to justifiable homicides in 2010. That number is 8,275 to 230. Granted, that's a huge disparity--but to those 230 people were deemed justly killed by someone with a firearm, that's a lot of potential lives saved from imminent danger. By comparison, the MoJo staff compiled a pictorial list of mass murder victims from 2012--all 151 of them. Clearly, those deaths are tragic, awful, and they each have a story worth telling. I don't blame them one bit for that story.

But what about the people who defended themselves against the 230 would-be assailants? Are their lives not valuable either?

And guns, of course, are also quite useful in dissuading attacks at all without pulling the trigger. Again, ahem, thanks to MoJo's fine research into federal crime data, we know that 338,700 people used guns for self-defense from 2007-2011, averaging out to 67,740 per year over that time.* That's a whole lot of self-defense. I can't say they were all at mortal risk, but it's foolish to think none of them were.

So yes, Mr. Harkinson, 12.5 million self-defense uses is probably too high. (I'm not sure where exactly that number came from, but my point holds even if I grant it.) But your own research shows thousands of cases of defensive gun use and at least 230 justifiable homicides in one year alone. I don't understand how that proves that "guns stop crimes" is a myth. Indeed, I think you proved exactly the opposite.

UPDATE 2:35PM: I was in a rush when I wrote this post, but having revisited the original article, I figured out where Harkinson seems to have come up with his 12.5 million self defense uses claimed by "the gun lobby." There is an oft-cited statistic that between 100,000 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses occur each year. It's hard to say what that number actually is, as someone who may have brandished a weapon to stop a crime from occurring may not report it. But if you multiply the high end of that estimate by 5, you end up with 12.5 million. I think there is a reasonable argument that an estimate in which the high end is 25 times the low end is inappropriate, but that's not the argument Harkinson is making.

If you take the low number of that estimate, cited in Mother Jones' own point #5 here, the accuracy of the claim leaps from .54% to 2/3 (67%). Even if the high end estimate is preposterous, and even if the low end is a bit of an exaggeration, that over 67,000 Americans use guns in self defense per year is noteworthy when discussing the number of occurrences of defensive gun use. Emphasizing comparisons of non-like statistics--as most crime victims are not themselves armed, or that gun-theft outpaces defensive gun use in unconnected instances--is irresponsible and to think such a framing was unintentional strains credulity. -JPB

 bellum medicamenti delenda est

*Their subsequent chart has the five year average at 67,600, but dividing 338,700 by 5 gets you the number I used. It's not terribly important to me. I mean, what's 140 self-defense uses among friends?

The Truth About Good Guys with Guns

NB: I'm writing strictly in my personal capacity, despite linking to my employer's website. Their endorsement should not be inferred. Thx, mgmt.

I'm beginning to believe Mark Follman was put on this Earth just to vex me. His latest at MoJo almost immediately gave me a migraine for its selectivity and implicit privilege in its data.

Moreover, our investigation made clear that so-called "good guys with guns" do not stop public shooting rampages. Likewise, Blair's data couldn't be any clearer when it comes to the National Rifle Association's favorite myth: He found just 3 cases out of 84 in which an armed individual who had been on the scene used a firearm to stop the shooter. And none of the three were ordinary citizens. According to Blair, in two instances those who intervened were off-duty police officers: one in a case in upstate New York in 2010, and another in a case in Philadelphia in 2005. The third case took place in Winnemucca, Nevada, in 2008; the man there who intervened and shot the rampaging gunman, as I've reported previously, was a US Marine.

Granted, the NRA and other pro-gun folks have been giving Follman & company a litany of straw men to take down. (There's an argument that Follman overestimates the utility of training police get with the use of firearms which he believes makes them something other than ordinary citizens, and any number of instances of police overreacting and endangering the public with reckless shootings supports this, but it's beside the point here.) I don't think every citizen should be armed at all times, but I think every law-abiding citizen should be able to protect himself if he feels threatened. And while only a few mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens, which I've already pointed out are themselves extraordinarily rare by any metric, the same is less true for more common crimes.

There are hundreds of documented cases of armed civilians stopping crime against themselves or others, and who knows how many robberies, rapes, and assaults are stopped by a citizen brandishing a weapon are never reported. The more zealous anti-gun folks support Vice President Biden's "if it saves one life" mantra for more gun control, but such simplistic sloganeering ignores the indisputable fact that, at least sometimes, guns save lives.

And in those instances, like this one in my old neighborhood, often don't find their way to national headlines because dozens of disrupted liquor store robberies in marginalized neighborhoods don't garner the same emotional effect as horrific scenes at middle class schoolhouses. And that makes complete sense when you're talking about what makes headlines, but national policy should be aimed at the broader problems: those issues which affect more people and have more common underlying factors like poverty, educational outcomes, high crime neighborhoods, drug abuse, and the like. But Follman exploits a freak and random tragedy in order to push new gun laws--none of which up for vote would have have affected Newtown one bit--without considering what impact they may have on places like the south side of Fort Wayne and any number of other cities where people have reason to defend themselves.

Law-abiding citizens have a right to protect themselves and have done so on literally countless occasions. Maybe "good guys with guns" don't stop random mass murderers, but they do stop a lot of other crime and save many lives. There is more to gun violence than mass shootings, and there is more to America than Newtown. Any new regulations should recognize both of these facts, where Follman recognizes neither.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Josh Marshall's Fear Itself

Nota Bene: Given the sensitive nature of the subject, I want to reiterate my blog's disclaimer that this is a personal blog and not to be associated with my employer or imply their endorsement. Thanks, JPB

Last week, TPM's top-man Josh Marshall took it upon himself to speak for "his tribe": "non-gun people." I am not so bold as to speak for anyone but myself, but I think his post merits a response.

After recounting a childhood memory in which he found himself playing with an actual gun and pointing it at a friend, Marshall explains his discomfort with guns:

More than this, I come from a culture where guns are not so much feared as alien, as I said. I don’t own one. I don’t think many people I know have one. It would scare me to have one in my home for a lot of reasons. Not least of which because I have two wonderful beyond belief little boys and accidents happen and I know that firearms in the home are most likely to kill their owners or their families. People have accidents. They get depressed. They get angry.

In the current rhetorical climate people seem not to want to say: I think guns are kind of scary and don’t want to be around them. Yes, plenty of people have them and use them safely. And I have no problem with that. But remember, handguns especially are designed to kill people. You may want to use it to threaten or deter. You may use it to kill people who should be killed (i.e., in self-defense). But handguns are designed to kill people. They’re not designed to hunt. You may use it to shoot at the range. But they’re designed to kill people quickly and efficiently.

That frightens me. I don’t want to have those in my home. I don’t particularly want to be around people who are carrying. Cops, I don’t mind. They’re trained, under an organized system and supposed to use them for a specific purpose. But do I want to have people carrying firearms out and about where I live my life — at the store, the restaurant, at my kid’s playground? No, the whole idea is alien and frankly scary. Because remember, guns are extremely efficient tools for killing people and people get weird and do stupid things. (emphases mine)

As many caveats and explanation he gives, Marshall is simply stating that his feelings about guns are based on fear, and that fear is rooted in ignorance of the 'alien.' Indeed, after corresponding with a reader who was defending the right to open carry, he writes:

But at this point I was already starting to see red. I don’t pretend that [Marshall's interlocutor] is representative. But it captured a mentality that does seem pervasive among many more determined gun rights advocates — basically that us non-gun people need to be held down as it were and made to learn that it’s okay being around people carrying loaded weapons.

Well, I don’t want to learn. That doesn’t work where I live — geographically or metaphorically. (emphases mine)

This last bit struck me particularly, because he made this post about "his tribe." This fear of people unlike him and this idea that he's 'forced to accept' the rights of others often emanates from the more reactionary Right, usually regarding open displays of homosexuality or, more directly related to fear, when uncomfortable in the presence of racial or religious minorities.*(1)

Take the Juan Williams fiasco, in which Williams said that he was frightened by people on airplanes in traditional Muslim garb. Williams' forthright prejudice was a personal bias against Muslims, not reflective of any real threat from a Muslim just because he was wearing a keffiye. (Indeed, the 9/11 hijackers, the probable source of Willams' discomfort, were wearing Western clothes during the attack.)  Marshall's fearful explanation is no different, as the vast majority of gun owners are not criminals nor will they ever pose a direct threat to others or themselves. Similarly, it is the same sort of fear that motivates the cliched white woman to clutch her purse when in the elevator with a black man. Just as there are Muslim (and other) terrorists and black (and other) criminals, there are gun owners (and others) who kill people. In our society, the individual enjoys a presumption of innocence, particularly when exercising his or her rights. That guns give people like Marshall the creeps is not enough to restrict them at the expense of others' rights. Marshall's fear is just as irrational, if more understandable on some level, but his locked-in bias against guns isn't a policy argument.

I personally think that people carrying openly for its own sake is an ostentatious, provocative, and unpersuasive political gesture, but that's their right. Brandishing a weapon is still a crime, as it should be and where the fear of a "non-gun person" is justified, but the right to carry a gun should not be generally prohibited to law-abiding citizens. If it makes Marshall feel better, any law-abiding citizen may 'open carry' in Virginia, but you probably wouldn't know it by walking around Old Town or Arlington. Just because it's legal, it doesn't mean it's common or likely to become so. I can understand Marshall's hesitation to live in a city where most everyone is carrying a gun, though I wouldn't fear it as he does, but its sheer unlikelihood makes it the most fanciful of his many listed fears and thus he need not "learn" that, despite what the other tribe is saying.

But there are plenty of legitimate reasons that someone may want to carry a weapon. Take, for example, what a facebook friend of mine recently posted (verbatim):

I lived in NYC for 10 years, without ONCE fearing for my safety. Yet, it's only when I move to the nation's capital (how ironic is that?) that I find myself truly on alert. After 2 gay men were attacked 3 blocks from my home, it finally dawned on me that I'm not in the Big Apple anymore and that perhaps, I need to learn some self-defense. But another thing dawned on me too: the conversation about guns and gun violence is mostly taking place among people who live in safe environments and can therefore feel confident in telling others they don't need a gun to defend themselves. It would really interest me to hear what less privileged people-- who live in higher crime areas-- have to say about the issue. I don't think anyone is listening to them right now.

I can't imagine she's alone in her particular fear, as brutal attacks on gays and other Queer minorities seem to be on the rise in the District.**(2) As to her revelation about privilege, Marshall virtually stipulates his own in his post.

In another context, the last time I saw my father carry, he was transporting a considerable but not huge amount of money in order to purchase a car from a neighbor whom he'd known for over 60 years. My father and his friend lived in a neighborhood in which break-ins induced more than a few homes to have bars on doors and windows, and thus he felt he—a fit man, but in his 70s at the time—could use protection in case someone decided to rob two seniors who they heard had a bit of money on them. (In my experience, many robberies are crimes of opportunity by which someone takes action after learning a piece of otherwise innocuous information.) Gun bans, such as those struck down in D.C. and Chicago, would have made criminals of my father and his friend, whom I recall was also carrying that day—or, alternatively, it would have made them more vulnerable to potential criminals who were neither persuaded nor hindered by gun bans. My father had personal reason to be wary, as many years before, and an off-duty police officer at the time, he once stopped his own mugging with his concealed service weapon.

I've never pointed a gun at anyone, but I had one at-the-ready when a friend of my then-girlfriend was a victim of domestic violence and escaped to our place. The abuser, on a previous friendly(-ish) occasion, decided to fireman-carry me up a flight of stairs on a lark. Despite being six feet tall and weighing over 200 lbs., I was upside-down and half up the stairs before I knew what was going on. I would be no match for him in a fistfight, and any non-firearm weapon would require close contact, which would leave me vulnerable to being overpowered. Furthermore, it was very likely he knew where she was. Fortunately, I never had to use that gun, but we slept more soundly that night knowing we had an effective defensive deterrent in case we needed it.

When you think about it, a considerable amount of gall is needed to deny the right of self-defense to others just because it makes you feel uncomfortable. I grant that perhaps Marshall was just speaking his mind and not actually pushing back against the right to carry, but the Left's push for legislation similarly relies on fear and their own notions of propriety. I'm not asking, let alone 'holding down,' anyone to enthusiastically accept gun rights. But Marshall and others should understand that a relative feeling of safety without a weapon is far from universal. Good for him that the idea of personally defending himself or his family against attack is an alien concept, but that's simply not the case for everyone, even in the "good" neighborhoods in D.C..

We can debate options for the future, such as expanding gun safety training to anyone who seeks to carry firearms publicly or various restrictions on time and place for carrying, but prejudicial fear of the presence of a loaded gun, however palpable to some, does not remotely approach the threshold appropriate to deny a responsible, law-abiding citizen his or her most fundamental right to self-defense.

I speak for no one but myself, but I understand the sometimes-imminent necessity of firearms for people that may not have the luxury of waiting for a 911 response. There are many who choose not to use firearms for self-protection, which is fine and I'm not telling them they should. But there are some who, at one time or another, feel safer carrying a weapon for self-defense, and their rights should be respected—despite the fears of Josh Marshall.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

*(1)This is not to say, at all, that gun owners are being persecuted like blacks, Muslims, or other minorities have been or currently are—it's that Marshall's remarks bear a strong resemblance to the myopic mentality that, in other contexts, sometimes feeds persecution: 'I don't want to learn in order to respect your rights.' To wit, direct comparisons to the Civil Rights Movement, Nazi Germany, and Stalinist Russia that many virulent gun-rights supporters have invoked are entirely off-base and offensive. American gun owners may have reason to be wary of potential government action, but they have no reasonable fear of oppression against them. Absolutely none. 
Furthermore, it should not be inferred that I think Marshall is a bigot. It's just that Marshall admitted his own close-mindedness about people carrying firearms and, to a "gun person," its syntactical resemblance to other forms of prejudice is unmistakable. That does not mean, however, the effect of his particular prejudice bears the same cultural weight as racial, religious, or identity prejudice—nor do I think it makes him a bad guy.

**(2) I use "Queer" as an all-encompassing term for non-heteronormative genders and identities. Though in context it should be obvious, I wanted to make clear since I'm a straight guy loosely  right of center.

Jeff Toobin's History: Scarcely Related to Reality

Jeffery Toobin’s new piece on Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni leaves one wanting. I was waiting for a “gotcha” moment or perhaps a revelation about the couple that I hadn’t previously known or, at least, anything of interest that would warrant a few thousand words in the New Yorker.

[sad trombone]

Instead, what I read was a bunch of intimation about the Thomases traveling in conservative social circles, the revelation that Justice Thomas is an originalist (!!!), and a smattering of information about his life on the High Court.

One could have gotten as much useful information off of the justice’s Wiki page.

But what got me about the article wasn’t its complete lack of substance—an appalling lack, though it was, given the outlet and the author’s credentials as an astute Court watcher—but its blatant whitewashing of 14^th Amendment history. Toobin writes:

In his jurisprudence, Thomas may be best known for his belief in a “color-blind Constitution”; that is, one that forbids any form of racial preference or affirmative action. But color blind, for Thomas, is not blind to race. Thomas finds a racial angle on a broad array of issues, including those which appear to be scarcely related to traditional civil rights, like campaign finance or gun control.* In Thomas’s view, the Constitution imposes an ideal of racial self-sufficiency, an extreme version of the philosophy associated with Booker T. Washington, whose portrait hangs in his chambers. (This personal gallery also includes Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.) *emphasis mine

I don't want to get into the campaign finance argument, but the gun rights comment was just too patently ignorant to let go.

Apparently looking to emulate his CNN colleague Wolf Blitzer and become the witless wonder of legal journalism, Toobin exhibits no respect for the substance of either the Heller or McDonald amicus briefs or decisions. Beyond that, Toobin should have a reasonable enough grasp of history—and by reasonable, I mean a basic, non-sanitized history understood by grown-ups—to be familiar with the stripping of blacks' legal protections that came in the post-Reconstruction era and continued up through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. When marauding bands of hooded murderers ride the nights on horseback, the ability to protect one's family from them is very much a civil right—and the systematic removal of those rights doesn't require a special “angle” of jurisprudence to understand. 

UCLA law professor Adam Winkler penned a piece for the September issue of the Atlantic called “The Secret History of Guns.” Professor Winkler spent nearly 2400 words (of roughly 4700) detailing the explicitly race-based nature of various gun control actions—from Andrew Johnson unsuccessfully vetoing the gun rights of Freedmen (the legislative precursors to the 14^th Amendment) to then-Governor Ronald Reagan capitalizing on the spectre of armed Black Panthers at the California capitol. A snippet:

Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

In response to the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen’s constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”

That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.

Fittingly, as DC readies itself to officially open the memorial to America's most beloved and famously peaceful civil rights leader, Winkler goes on to note that Martin Luther King Jr. applied for—and was denied—a concealed carry permit for a handgun after his home was bombed.

Apparently Dr. King also subscribed to this “extreme” and peculiar “angle” of civil rights.

It's not that I think Toobin wrote this as a hit piece. (It was, if anything, a miss piece.) But by writing this as he did, he mischaracterized an important and well-documented aspect of traditional civil rights in America that—at the very least—any responsible Court watcher would instantly recognize from recent cases, whether or not he agreed with the policy outcomes. Toobin goes further to imply Thomas relies on a revisionist history that is perceived through his putatively unorthodox originalism and colored by his race. That is simply bullshit. 

Gun rights and self-defense have gone hand-in-hand with civil rights for blacks since the very first Civil Rights Act in our nation's history. It seems Mr. Toobin is the one with a questionable understanding of traditional American civil rights. 

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Guns Save Lives...In My (Old) Neighborhood

This is the neighborhood I grew up in:

A suspected armed robber lost a gun battle with a clerk at the Belmont Beverage store at the intersection of East Tillman Road and Lafayette Street on Wednesday afternoon, police said.

The unidentified man lay dead in the middle of East Tillman Road outside the store where police said he was fatally shot about 2:30 p.m.

“The perpetrator was armed with a handgun, which was recovered at the scene,” said police spokesman Officer Michael Joyner.

A store clerk was shot in the leg by the suspect and was in fair condition Wednesday night; he was expected to be released today, according to police.

That's right--robbing a liquor store in broad daylight. If you click to the story and look at the pictures, you'll notice that that particular liquor store's front is clear glass and easily seen from the road. Cops patrol around there, but there is no way they'd respond in time except out of pure luck.

And it isn't as if this is an isolated incident:

Michael Beckman, who said he moved into the neighborhood in May of 2007, also wasn't surprised. He recalled that a clerk fatally shot a would-be robber Sept. 12, 2007, at the nearby VIP Video store at 7504 S. Anthony Blvd., and said the liquor store was robbed twice last summer.

If the Brady Center and their ilk had their way, it could very well be the two clerks that would be dead instead of the two thugs who threatened the lives of people who were just trying earn an honest living.

Quote of the Day

(Ok, it was this weekend. But I've been traveling, so deal)

[D.C. Police Chief Cathy] Lanier, who was accompanied at the news conference by City Administrator Dan Tangherlini with Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) out of town, defended the [Trinidad neighborhood] checkpoints yesterday as legal and a useful police tool. "Until a judge orders me to stop, I'm going to do everything I can to protect the people in Trinidad," Lanier said.

Except, of course, make it easier for the citizens to protect themselves with handguns.

DC v. Heller FYI

The Heller case should be released next week, probably Monday, and you can be sure that Cato will have something to say about it. So, for the facts of the case, as well as Bob Levy's statement as soon as the decision comes down, please go here.

Thanks!

Marvin, His Bar, and His Gun

When I turned Mike and Mike in the Morning on as I was getting ready for work today, I heard veteran ESPN reporter and resident Phillyophile Sal Paolantonio go on and on about the shooting outside the garage and down the street from a bar that Colts WR Marvin Harrison owns.

What bugged me about the story is two-fold:

1) Paolantonio, whose reporting I normally respect, harped on the type of gun Harrison handed-in for the investigation: a custom made Belgian pistol designed to 'kill cops.' This is an assertion Paolantonio made because it reportedly is so powerful its ammo can go through many layers of Kevlar at 50m. Granted, the gun may be particularly powerful, but for some reason I don't think there are a bunch of police-hating Belgian gun designers plotting to perfect "cop-killer" weapons.


2) Paolantonio then began to speculate as to why Harrison, a multi-millionaire and probable future Hall of Famer (provided he's not taken down in this or another scandal of some kind) , would bother to run a bar, a garage and car wash in his very violent neighborhood back in Philadelphia. It was unfathomable to this man, who lives and breathes life in Philly, that a native son would own businesses where he was raised. Apparently Sal believes that NFL players should stick to filming United Way ads and volunteering in their adopted communities instead of providing people needed jobs and desired services where they grew up.

I don't know enough about the story to say whether Marvin is guilty of a crime or not. Looking over some reports, it looks like the weapon--while legal and registered--was not in the place it was supposed to have been (Harrison's home). And if there was any impropriety, God knows the NFL will act swiftly and, in all probability, harshly against the star receiver. But those issues are for the courts and the NFL to decide.

In the meantime, Sal and co. should stick to reporting more of Donovan McNabb's whiny dramathon and the success of the Philadelphia Flyers in the Stanley Cup Playoffs than criticizing an unaccused man for owning a legal firearm and running legitimate businesses in his hometown.

D.C. v. Heller

My first reaction listening to the oral arguments in the gun ban case is surprise. I am completely taken aback by the lack of focus on the part of Walter Dellinger, counsel for the District -- it was as if he didn't buy his own arguments.

When I listened to the oral arguments of the Boumediene case, I was certainly against the position of Solicitor General Paul Clement -- but he more than competently presented his position. Dellinger, on the other hand, seemed almost amateurish in his delivery, and certainly was not the impassioned advocate that Alan Gura was for Heller.

That said, it seems clear that Heller will be victorious on at least the most basic level. The problem will be how Roberts (I can only assume he will write the opinion, but it seems likely) tailors the exceptions. The Chief Justice has been an incrementalist and will probably not be as sweeping as, say, Scalia would be. So, we'll see where he draws the line and go from there.

Oral Argument audio can be found here (scroll down). Transcript here.

L.A. Nightmare: Kids With Guns

In my morning scan of the major U.S. newspapers, I found a paranoid rant in the L.A. Times reacting to the possibility of concealed-carry laws on college campuses:

Iam having a recurring nightmare.

It takes place in a lecture hall at Anywhere State College during a tedious presentation on the history of video games. The only alert person in the class, a straight-A student majoring in Wi-Fi, suddenly notices an unfamiliar male entering the room.

He is wearing a hooded sweat shirt because it is cold outside and the wind is blowing, but it makes him look like a convenience store crook. He is also carrying a backpack and begins to reach into it.

I know, because I am an observer in the nightmare, that the stranger is only going for his NRA Play Station "Blood in Space" to occupy his mind during the lecture by a professor whose topic that day is "Pacman, the Godfather." The subject is, like, yesterday, and hardly anyone is listening or even paying attention to the presence in the doorway.

But the alert Wi-Fi major in the sixth row, whom everyone knows by the nickname "Guns," is sure that the doorway figure fits the profile of a campus killer and isn't about to sit there and be murdered without a fight. Guns instantly draws his legal 9-millimeter Beretta and begins blasting away.

The gunfire arouses the instincts of others in the class, and they, similarly, draw their permit-allowed weapons ranging from handguns to shoulder-mounted rocket launchers and join the fun. One student throws a flash/stun grenade.

Obviously, the Al Martinez doesn't really think that kids will start toting grenade launchers to class -- but his point is no less ridiculous. Only a fool could honestly believe that legalizing concealed-carry at colleges and universities will turn 9 A.M. lectures into the OK Corral.

The idea of a room full of 19-year-olds packing 9's to Psych 101 just because the government says its legal is absurd on its face. Certainly, some will. But on the list of things college kids spend their loan money on, guns fall far behind illegal purchases of beer, drugs, liquor, and more beer.

A legitimate point could have been made -- allowing guns on a campus where frat parties happen could lead to all kinds of trouble. The combination of drunk people and firearms is my greatest concern with allowing guns on campus, and it is an issue that deserves serious attention.

However, Mr. Martinez decides to skip all legitimate concerns and just appeals to emotion:

This time I am taking my grandson to his kindergarten class at the behest of his mother, who has a doctor's appointment. As I am watching him run off happily into the play yard on School Street, I notice that another little boy has dropped his Roy Rogers lunch box.

It is red and yellow and has a picture of Rogers on the front mounted on Trigger, who is rearing. Rogers is waving his cowboy hat in the air the way he used to in all of those exciting 1950s westerns. I am intrigued by the lunch box because most kids today don't even know who Roy Rogers is, or was, much less Trigger, who is stuffed and mounted in a museum in Branson, Mo.

Then something equally significant catches my eye. In addition to the apple, carrot sticks and tofu sandwich that fall from the boy's lunch box, there is a snub-nosed .38-caliber revolver of the type I once carried as a backup weapon while a Marine fighting in the Korean War.

...

The gun in the lunch box? That doesn't surprise me because it is within the guidelines of a new state law that mandates the right of students from grades K-12 to carry firearms to school to protect themselves against kids with guns. (This is a nightmare, after all.) It is basically the same right that had been granted earlier to college students.

...

I awoke from the nightmare both pondering the possibilities and writhing from the very notion of kids with guns. But then I finally calmed down, comforted by the fact that it was only a bad dream and not a reality.

At least not yet.

Yes. That's right. Coming to a playground near you-- 5-year-olds packing heat, with government sanction, no less.

Give me a break.

"Everywhere, police, police, police"

In today's Washington Post, a curious story details the ridiculousness of the District's gun laws -- without, apparently, recognizing the absurdity of them all.

The reporter goes to great lengths describing all the loopholes that provide for firearms ownership within the District, quoting a gun expert who says there are "thousands and thousands of legal firearms" in D.C.:

Because the city's "handgun ban" does not ban handguns entirely, and because the statute outlaws only certain kinds of rifles and shotguns, a huge number of D.C. residents legally possess firearms.

A "huge number."

That huge number does not include any non-"Special Police Officer" who has moved into the city since 1976 -- which I think would qualify as a "huger" number of people who may otherwise wish to protect themselves from intruders and other violent offenders.

But, surely, the gun ban has had a positive effect on violent crime since the ban, right?

Well, not so much. As you can see below, as linked above the article in the online edition of the Post, the homicide justification for the bans is flimsy, to be polite:

I have no idea how an article that justifies the bans by pointing out numerous exemptions to the ban can link to such a damning graphic and maintain such a contrary position. Granted, the piece does not explicitly back the bans, but I fail to see the "news" in the fact that people in D.C. have guns.

Of course, most of the exemptions are for law enforcement agencies, both public and private. I think this is a telling statement about how the government works, grows, and dominates the culture. What's more, its growing influence -- literally at the point of a gun -- goes virtually unchallenged as the populace is deprived of their right to self-defense:

[D.C. police Lt. Jon] Shelton can hold forth in encyclopedic detail on the thicket of laws and rules that apply to special police officers. There's a separate maze of regulations governing off-duty D.C. and federal police officers and what types of guns, if any, they are allowed to carry in the District.

Some agencies -- the D.C. police and U.S. Park Police for example -- fall under Title 18 of the U.S. Code, meaning officers are allowed (even required) to be armed at all times and have police powers throughout the city. Officers in other departments, such as the Library of Congress police, fall under Title 40, Shelton said. They have police powers only where they work and are not allowed to carry guns on private or city property while off duty.

"In D.C., we have all these quasi-law enforcement agencies," he said. "Everywhere, police, police, police -- it's like every federal agency in the city has its own police force. It's hard to keep up with who's under what title."

(Emphasis added.)

So, the government and its nimiety of overlapping police organizations glut the District, whereas no private individual -- save those in law enforcement and life-long residents approaching their 60s -- may legally possess a handgun for protection in one of the most dangerous cities in the nation.

When it comes to self-defense, it seems some District residents are more equal than others.

Ron Paul talks MLK on CNN

and I'm not impressed.

I think it was a good thing for him to repudiate what was written in the Ron Paul Newsletters, although I think he got caught being disingenuous when Blitzer asked him if he ever read his newsletters. But, no matter.

Paul's invocation of the be-all-end-all of Civil Rights Movement name-dropping annoyed me. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a brave and remarkable man. And yes, there were specific attacks against MLK in the newsletters, so his mentioning was probably a necessity on some level. However, using the name so much and calling MLK a "libertarian" is just plain wrong.

In Letter From a Birmingham Jail,** King proposed a "G.I. Bill" for blacks -- a subsidization of black people by the federal government. In some ways, it was one of the earliest calls for reparations in black American history. (Furthermore, MLK's strict adherence to non-violence that Paul applauded is, when applied while under attack, an abandonment of self-defense and self-ownership.)

What is lost on so many people who do not understand the length and breadth of the Civil Rights movement is that MLK, particularly toward the end of his life, was indeed becoming more radical in his thinking -- and more socialist. For all his good intent, the path MLK would have taken the nation was toward further black enslavement, at least economically speaking. (This was evidenced and played out in part by LBJ's 'War on Poverty').

Malcolm X, on the other hand, was very much in favor of self-empowerment for blacks. I will grant, fully, that during his time at NOI, his rhetoric was disparaging toward whites, conspiratorial to a very paranoid degree, and arguably flat-out racist. (But then again, he wasn't running for president, now was he?)

But upon even passive analysis, his ideas toward the end of his life -- and the positive ideas leftover from his NOI days -- would be much closer to "libertarian" than anything King ever suggested:

-development of business skills and entrepreneurship
-gun rights/self-defense
-mistrust of the government and political parties
-personal responsibility
-self-education
-the importance of liberty (which I blogged about here, with video)

I would not go so far to say that Malcolm was a libertarian, but his libertarian credentials outshine MLK's by a long shot.


Thus, Paul could have as easily said "Some of my best friends are black" and it would have meant just as much to me -- and would perhaps be closer to the truth than "MLK was a libertarian."

I do believe Paul did the right thing by finally addressing this personally.

I just wish he had been better at it.

ADDENDUM: My former colleagues at reason take issue with Paul's statement here.

UPDATE: And David Boaz breaks Cato's silence on the rEVOLution here. Long list of RP under-bus-tossing here.

**UPDATE II (2014): I just happened upon this post again. I stand by it, but at some point  in the years since I wrote it realized King's endorsement of an expansion of the GI Bill wasn't part of the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which I had believed for some time. I can't remember where I read it, but I'm 99% sure he publicly advocated for it in print. Even if I'm wrong, the point holds that he was, among other things, a vocal proponent of more Progressive government aid and while in favor of liberty in the broad sense, not in a libertarian one vis-a-vis the proper role of government in the economic sphere.

Update: Colorado Shooting

From the security guard who took down the killer in the Colorado church shootings:

[Security Guard Jeanne] Assam said, "I wasn't just going to wait for him to do further damage."

How much damage could he have done?

[Gunman/dead guy Matthew] Murray was carrying two handguns, an assault rifle and over 1,000 rounds of ammunition, said Sgt. Jeff Johnson of the Colorado Springs Police Department.

But gun control advocates would say that calling 911 and waiting for the police would be the prudent thing to do.

Tell that to the survivors.

Moon Shot?

Yet another person with a weapon stops a criminal from hurting people:

An off-duty SWAT team member is being called a hero Sunday after shooting an armed robber outside a Brevard County supermarket.

Investigators said it all began after a man went into the Winn-Dixie on Singleton Avenue with a shotgun Saturday night. He then fired a shot at an office door to get inside and grab money.

Cool. But what unit is he from?

A member of the Kennedy Space Center SWAT team walked in the store, saw what was happening, and then went back to his car to get his gun.

Why in the world does the Kennedy Space Center have a SWAT team?

Murderous Moron Killed By Church Security Guard

In the latest event of jackass-gone-mad with a gun, a downplayed portion of the story buried in the text:

The gunman was killed by a member of the church's armed security staff before police arrived, Myers said.

That's right. This guy was killed by a private citizen before the police could respond. Granted, I've never been to a church with an armed security staff, but it seems this particular sect felt (correctly) that God's grace wasn't enough to protect them. Does it not make sense that we shouldn't rely on God or the police to protect the rest of us as well?

I predict that gun control advocates will be remarkably silent on this instance of private citizens handling this situation before police could react. They cannot wrap their heads around the fact that 2nd Amendment protects the most basic and fundamental individual right to self-defense. If our rights mean anything, the idea that we are allowed to be responsible for the safety of ourselves and families must be respected.

More prominently placed in the article, and quite grotesque when you think about it, is this statement by Colorado Governor Bill Ritter:

"Violent crimes of any sort are tragic enough, but when innocent people are killed in a religious facility or a place of worship, we must voice a collective sense of outrage and demonstrate a renewed commitment to keeping our communities safe."

Because this would be less tragic if it were at a secular event like a symphony or football game or MALL SHOPPING? This putrid comment serves only to placate the religious people in his state while simultaneously lowering the value of life for non-practicing/non-believing citizens.

Given the timing, one shudders to think that he may be trying to one-up the victims in Omaha.